OVER 65,000 Palestinians have now been killed as a result of Israel’s devastating military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the territory’s Health Ministry said today.

It said the death toll had climbed to 65,062, with another 165,697 wounded, since Israel launched its genocidal onslaught following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7 2023.

Around half of the dead were women and children, the ministry noted.

Israel’s offensive has destroyed vast areas of Gaza, displaced around 90 per cent of the population and caused a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into Gaza City today, the second day of a ground offensive that has been widely condemned internationally, as Palestinians fled the devastated area en masse.

Israel’s military said that air force and artillery units had struck the city over 150 times in the last few days, ahead of ground troops moving in.

The strikes have toppled high-rise block of flats in areas densely populated by tent camps where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering. Israel claims the towers are being used by Hamas to watch its invading troops.

Over half of the Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday night and early today were in famine-stricken Gaza City, including a child and his mother who died in their flat in the Shati refugee camp, according to officials at Shifa hospital, which received the casualties.

More than 7,500 Israeli citizens have signed a petition calling for an end to the war and urging governments around the world to recognise Palestinian statehood.

Zazim, the Jewish-Arab campaign group behind the petition, hopes to gain 10,000 signatures from “Israelis who support peace and the recognition of a Palestinian state.”

The group plans to submit it to the heads of state gathering the New York next week for a meeting of the United Nations general assembly to show “a strong and clear Israeli voice that opposes the eternal war” on the Palestinians.

A coalition of leading aid groups urged the international community today to take stronger measures to stop Israel’s Gaza City offensive. It came a day after a commission of UN experts said that Israel was committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

In Qatar, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a statement saying it condemned “in the strongest terms” Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza. The ministry wrote on social media that the operation marked a “extension of the war of genocide” against the Palestinians.